Even with charter schools, Alabama would have flunked Race to the Top

MOBILE, Ala. -- Much of the public debate about Alabama’s shortcomings in the Race to the Top competition for school funding centered on its lack of charter schools. But that particular issue proved to have little impact on the state’s dismal finish, according to a Press-Register analysis.

In fact, even if Alabama had received all 40 points available for having “charter or other innovative schools,” it would have advanced only from last place to second-to-last among 36 states that applied in the federal competition’s final round.

Alabama scored 212 points out of 500 in Race to the Top. With charter schools, it would have jumped Montana, but still trailed Mississippi, and still needed 189 more points to win any money.

Judges pointed out flaws in Alabama’s application, notably that the Alabama Education Association teachers union did not sign off on it, and that only 105 of the 132 local school systems agreed to participate in the proposed reforms.

AEA Executive Secretary Paul Hubbert said that state officials never asked for his input or showed him a draft. He said he would have opposed at least one proposal in the application: to start evaluating teachers based on student test scores.

The state still intends to pursue the new evaluation procedure, perhaps piloting it next year, according to Deputy Superintendent Tommy Bice.

“If teacher X is able to move students along faster than teacher Y, what is it in her practice that’s working?” Bice said. “We would not look at this as punitive, but we’d be able to identify the skills that they have.”

Race to the Top judges criticized Alabama for failing to provide alternative pathways to train principals and teachers, particularly in math and science, or creating a program to attract quality teachers and principals to hard-to-staff schools.

Said Bice, “We didn’t want to commit ourselves to doing things that we couldn’t sustain. We were cautious. ... We weren’t funded, but this was still a great process because we’ve identified some programs we need to work on. Now we need to build on those.”

Alabama also lost ground because the state school board has not yet adopted a core curriculum in line with nationally adopted standards. The board is scheduled to do so this fall, said its vice president, Randy McKinney of Gulf Shores.

According to McKinney, the board saw no gain in rushing through a new curriculum just to have a long shot at federal money.

Race to the Top was designed to encourage states to radically reform and improve the ways that they provide public education. In total, 11 states and the District of Columbia received shares of the $4.35 billion that President Obama’s administration doled out to competition leaders.

Three states surrounding Alabama won: Tennessee, $500 million in the first round; and Georgia, $400 million, and Florida, $700 million, in the second round.

Gov. Bob Riley sought this year to rally support for charter schools, and noted that Alabama needed them for Race to the Top. But the AEA put up a strong fight, including television advertisements.

All of the winning states have charter schools.

Caroline Novak, president of A+ Education Partnership in Montgomery, said Alabama has much work to do to strengthen schools. She said that the state took a positive step by offering some possible solutions in its application and that it can look to winning states for ideas.

She said that the state needs to work on its methods of training, evaluating and deploying teachers. She supports using test scores among the evaluation measures.

"What is hopeful about this process is that we’re moving to a system that may help us understand where our effective teachers are, how to make them more effective, and how to give them to the students that need them the most,” Novak said.

Hubbert, though, said that Alabama actually scored lower in the second round of Race to the Top than it did during the first round, when he rejected some of the proposals and the state took them out.

“One of the people in charge of writing the second grant made the statement that they had accommodated the AEA in the first round, so this time they were going to write it for the boys and girls,” Hubbert said. “They dropped from 290 to 212. That’s kind of ironic.”